(With an Added Bonus Regarding Negative Politics)

What follows is an excerpt from a book I sort-of published in the mid-1990’s.  By “sort of”, I mean that it was rejected by some of the finest publishing houses in America because it was too long (560 pages) and had a limited potential market.  The Republican National Committee agreed to take it off our hands (there was a co-author whose name is not revealed to protect his reputation) and we were paid the equivalent of lunch money for each disk sold to potential GOP candidates across the country.

From “In the Trenches” published by Ripon Press.

Successful attacking involves the judicious use of logical fallacies.  Crafty attackers never lie and they never spread vicious rumors.  Rather, they engage in what we call shabby honesty.  … It all depends on how shabby you want to be and the depth of shabbiness tolerated by your electorate.  This varies from region to region.

If you are not willing to be illogical (not immoral, mind you), you’re in the wrong game and public office will forever elude you.  Very few contests feature one candidate who is completely out of character with his district because politically astute people are not, generally, boneheads.

Your disagreements with your opponent will likely be at the margin and political reality demands that you do everything you can to sharpen, highlight, and throw into stark relief those disagreements.  Since your opponent will not oblige you by being a wacko, it is up to you to make him look like a sort-of wacko anyway.  The use of logical fallacies accomplishes this goal.  We call it “shabby honesty” because we abhor attempts to sugarcoat what it is we are about.  If your morals do not permit your indulgence in shabby honesty, we understand.

The most popular fallacy for achieving shabby honesty is the slippery slope argument.  Slippery slopes are hard to detect, frequently true and very convincing.  They are fallacious because they seek to infer an irresistible and causal link between some current horror and projected horrors to follow.  When Atlantic City was debating legal casino gambling, opponents declared that approval would open their fair city to the influence of organized crime.  This argument was fallacious on two counts.  First, it assumed that organized crime was not already in the city, which was ludicrous.  Second, it sought to convince voters that organized crime was caused by legal gambling — a convincing but erroneous argument.  Slippery slope arguments are used to carry your enemy’s issue position to its (il)logical conclusion.

The false choice fallacy is also useful because it simultaneously bolsters your own position while trashing that of the enemy.  “I believe that if we don’t double the number of police cars in our city, crime will mushroom out of control and we’ll be forced to remain behind locked doors (slippery slope added for good measure).”  The choice is false because it assumes, fallaciously, that only two alternatives exist and ignores the fact that many other possible solutions to the problem of crime can be crafted.

One of the most frequently used routes on the path to shabby honesty is the straw man argument.  This fallacy consists of taking your opponent’s views and misrepresenting them slightly.  It is dishonest.  Use it only under the most extreme circumstances because it rarely works.

Oddly, voters don’t get terribly exercised over shabby honesty when they recognize it, passing it off with “Oh, that’s just politics-as-usual.”  We have frequently belittled voters in these pages but they still have the ability to sort out arrant trash in political discourse.  That’s why straw man arguments, if carried to ludicrous ends, will fail.  Slippery slope and false choice attacks are preferred, but only if they are limited to mild extensions of what the opponent really said.  For instance, if the foe has come out in favor of building a new waste treatment plant, you can attack him by calling him a supporter of pork and still be plausible.  If he tries to accuse you of wanting to poison the drinking water of small children, voters will gaze heavenward in disgust.

On the other side of the coin, never permit the tiniest error to mar your own printed or spoken statements.  We have been privileged to sit among some of the most ferocious political killers the world has ever known but none of them would allow the slightest falsehood to issue from their midst.  Within the generous confines of shabby honesty may be found a wealth of weasel words and logical extensions.  Never lie or misquote your opponent because that gives him a large stick with which to beat you about the head and shoulders.

With [a sufficient] quantity of fat in the fire, the media — The Great Mentioner — will elevate your race from “listless” to “heating up” or, better still, to “nasty”.  Even Undecideds will begin to take notice and choose up sides.  Do you think it is a pity that such tactics are necessary to gain press attention?  Wouldn’t it be better if campaigns were conducted on a loftier (or at least less sordid) plane?  Isn’t democracy ill-served when politicians pander so slavishly to that which is meanest in the human spirit?

The answer to all those questions is twofold:  Yes; and so what?

What line of work are you in, after all?  When you signed up to be a candidate, were you under the impression that it would be tea parties and ice cream sociables throughout?  Did not some small portion of your mind warn you that the going might get a little rough?  If it did, you probably thought that you had to be prepared to fend off attacks and never gave a thought to the possibility that you might have to launch them yourself.  My, my, my; what a dirty business politics is.  No wonder people hate it.

Give us a break!  We contend that attack tactics are not only justified by the terms of battle — they are a moral obligation as well.

Somewhere on your list of reasons for seeking office is the hint that you are better able to discharge the office’s duties than your opponent.  You are obliged to share that conviction with voters because to do otherwise would be a disservice to them.  Touting your own worthiness is one way of accomplishing this goal, but it works better if you juxtapose your virtues with the opponent’s failings.  The former method is too subtle and voters often miss subtlety.

We had a client once who was opposing another newcomer for an open seat.  The county was quietly investigating the opponent’s supporters for influence peddling and we were privy to all the details.  It looked like the investigation would not be completed until after the election and our candidate was running behind.  We urged him to reveal the investigation and attack the opponent — something he was morally reluctant to do.  We pointed out that her victory would place into high office a person who was likely in the pocket of unsavory people and that he had an ethical requirement to let voters know what was going on.  He refused.  When the woman was elected, she spent four years doing nothing for her constituents because the investigation resulted in jail terms for some of her supporters.  So tainted was she by their misdeeds that she served only one ineffective term.  The true victims of our client’s refusal to attack were the district’s constituents.

We have little patience with political hand-wringers and editorial bedwetters who weep over the sorry state of political discourse in contemporary America.  Candidates and consultants are held responsible by these misguided do-gooders, mainly because we are easy targets and no one wants to tell the truth — which is that voters demand negative politics.  We are not here to comfort fools with pious words about the sanctity of the process or the collective wisdom of voters.  Here are some unvarnished truths:

• American politics has always been negative and always will be.
• If politics were conducted with the dignity of a Paris art salon, voters would never do their duty.  We are reminded of the story of the farmer whose soft-hearted approach to training mules was known far and wide.  When a visitor asked for a demonstration, the farmer’s first act was to clobber the poor beast with a plank.  “I thought you believed that mules should be trained with kindness”, the shocked visitor said.  “Quite right”, responded the farmer, “But first, you have to get their attention.”  Nothing gets a voter’s attention like a verbal slugfest.
• Many people believe that negative politics is the cause of low voter turnout.  In fact, negative politics has kept turnout from falling to even lower levels.  Non-voters say they avoid discharging their civic obligation because of “dirty politics” and the presence of two evils on the ballot, but most of them are fibbing.
• The people who deplore negative campaigning are of two types.  The first is usually a newspaper writer who mistakenly believes that voters are just as fascinated with political issues as he is.  They are not.  75% of the American people are bored silly by the whole thing.  The second type is the doe-eyed reformer who believes that the Biblical injunction “Come, let us reason together” applies regardless of whether your opponent is a reasonable man with different views or a downright thug with no respect for people’s rights and privileges.
• Please don’t compare our politics with the saintly methods used elsewhere.  This is America, for heaven’s sake.  This is the place where two men would stand in the middle of a western street and play “fastdraw”, the object of which was to kill the opponent.  We tolerate a crime rate that is several orders of magnitude higher than any other nation having a working government.  Moderation is alien to our national character — we thrive on extremes and would rather select from Right and Wrong than learn about complicated policy alternatives.
• Politicians and their advisors will never change the attitudes of voters in this regard because we are required to appeal to voters on their terms, not ours. Politicians are no more responsible for the low estate of public debate than Delta Airlines is for cloudy skies.  Both have to operate in the area nature has assigned.
• Americans do grow weary of the constant bickering today, just as they wearied of it when Andrew Jackson was President.  But we are the most successful free nation in the history of the planet.  America has one of the oldest governments in the world, largely because we weed out the political Milquetoasts early in the process and fight each other with harsh words rather than bullets (false choice).
• Those who believe that we are going to hell in a handbasket because candidates behave in an ungentlemanly fashion, should get off their couch-crenilated keesters and run for office themselves.  Let them find out first-hand how easy it is to bore a voter and how infinitely preferable it is to arouse him instead.  If we are pursuing bad policies, it is not because the process is flawed, it is because voters frequently want to have their cake and eat it too.  To believe otherwise is worse than shooting the messenger — it’s shooting the piece of paper the message is written on.

Pant, pant, pant.

Politics does not demand of her practitioners that they shed their virtue as a price of entry.  If a politician behaves like a vicious, snarling beast it is not because he is a politician, but, rather, because he is a vicious, snarling beast and has always been one.  Mississippi’s late (and unlamented) Senator Bilbo was a racist tub-thumper without elected peer, not because politics forced him to, but because he was a genuinely despicable human being.